#TIL there’s a crater on Mercury named after Turlough O’Carolan as of yesterday! http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/news_room/details.php?id=283
#TIL about Songlines, an indigenous Australian belief which serves as a communication and navigation tool. Songlines, as well as much other aboriginal culture, seems to be fascinating supporting evidence for the thesis of The Singing Neanderthals — that proto-language was made up of holistic (no grammar), multi-modal communications utilising metaphor and mimickry.
#TIL that “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” was appropriated by Pete Seeger (and then further sanitized by George Weiss) from a song written by Solomon Linda, who died in poverty. His family only received royalties for the song’s widespread Disney use after a lawsuit in 2006 — 44 years later.
There’s an archive of the in-depth three part write-up of the whole thing from Rolling Stone by Rian Malan here.
#TIL about thought-terminating clichés, an excellent term for an annoying discussion habit. Adding Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism to my reading list.
#TIL I’ve been confusing steganography with stenography
#TIL IE doesn’t upload csv files with text/* media type. Content-type cannot be trusted, the only way of telling if data is of a particular type is to see if it parses successfully.
#TIL according to G translate, there’s only one . difference between “I am proud” and “I have chair”:
(Given, of course, that you leave out the accent on the ó. It’s not so funny if you spell it correctly) #icelandic
#TIL about #postgres EXPLAIN [ANALYZE] statement postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/sql-explain.html — handy for figuring out which parts of complex queries need optimising.
#TIL about the Weiquan Movement
#TIL there’s a URL-based API for Google street view. Spent this afternoon making a tool for automating hyperlapses with it developers.google.com/maps/documentation/streetview
#TIL Final Fantasy has #gurdy reference: pair of cute “moogle” (furry animal with big ears apparently) siblings called “Hurdy” and “Gurdy”:
#TIL about Unifont http://czyborra.com/unifont/
#TIL about·the·interpunct enwp.org/Interpunct — turned up in some customer-submitted CSVs at work.
#TIL 7th January is the Japanese Festival of Seven Herbs day enwp.org/Nanakusa_no_sekku — might try making some of the herb rice porridge next year
#TIL leathal salt dosage is around 80g
#TIL Nina Paley released sitasingstheblues.com into the public domain
#TIL throwdough.com exists and that it’s the official dough of the American pizza team and that there’s an American pizza team and that they have practise dough #food #baking #pizza
#TIL about Esquivalience, a Fictitious Entry. More proof that #copyright law is bad for consumers, driving organisations to compromise the integrity of their publications.
#TIL Nicola Pellow (author of the first line mode browser) was from, or at least lived in, Okehampton, Devon (WWW/People -- Pellow)